Laura Dassow Walls

This biography is simply excellent. It rounded out and filled in what I already knew about the mystic naturalist of Concord. In some cases, it corrected what I only thought I knew. While admitting that there were two Thoreaus, the private and the public, Dassow Walls defends him against the charge -- leveled in his own time and ever since -- of hypocrisy. For instance, those Sunday visits to his close-by family; Thoreau never claimed he built his Walden cabin to become a hermit but to write. show more "No other male American writer has been so discredited for enjoying a meal with loved ones or for not doing his own laundry."

There was poignancy in the account of his trip to Maine with Penobscot guide Joseph Polis. Perhaps no Caucasian North American sought more intently to understand and value Native Americans on their own terms, yet his response when Polis began to share the creation myth of his tribe, Thoreau's response showed Polis there was a limit to his sympathy.

In addition to giving me context for the Thoreau books I've already read, it also made me eager to delve more deeply, especially in the Journals. show less

Detailed, rich, and very moving. I actually shed some tears at the end: one gets to know Thoreau (or, I guess, to be accurate, Walls's version of him) so well, that his quiet death really leaves a mark in one's consciousness when it occurs. This beautiful biography is everything I could have wanted, and is sending me back to the works with a vengeance.

Beautifully written and as thorough as any biography on Thoreau. Having been to Walden Pond and walked on the ground where he build his cabin, reading the parts of Thoreau’s life from WP were all that more meaningful. This biography dispels the myth that Henry was a solitary man. He was anything but a loner. In fact, when he went on excursions, it was his preference to take someone along, and he usually did. Reading Walden is enough to given readers an appreciation of Thoreau’s powers of show more observation and documentation. He filled hundreds of notebooks during his lifetime, a treasure trove of information about nature and the wonders of nature. Laura Dassow Walls has given Thoreau fans a gift to complement the great author’s masterpiece, Walden. show less

I read through his childhood and young adult years, up until his sojourn into the wilderness ... one mile away from his parents' house and it was fine. Then I detoured and read Walden. After Thoreau's two year, two month, and two day experiment ended, I headed back to the biography and that's when I really started enjoying myself. Thoreau's views on slavery, war, Native Americans, and evolution were all progressive and his actions were sometimes just as brave. When he escorted escaped slaves show more to trains bound for Canada or when he was the first to speak out nationally in support of John Brown after the Harper's Ferry uprising, he showed his true character. And when his first thoughts after reading Darwin's Origin of the Species were that all men truly were created equal and that the ranking of the races had no actual basis in nature (as was claimed by pro-slavery jerks), I couldn't help but become one of Thoreau's biggest fans. His thoughts on conservation and natural spaces and even hunting were just the icing on the cake. I'll admit to shedding quite a few tears when he died at the age of 44 from tuberculosis. He could have done so much more with the other half a lifetime that he was denied.

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